The review's verdict after resolution blocks: 'still choices attached to
prompts, not spaces that naturally produce play'. The hand-written delve gives
a place — four people back-to-back around a dead lantern — and the decisions
fall out of it. DELVE gave a decision and asked the GM to imagine the room.
Every area now carries a situation: an occupant, what they are doing, what
changes when the party walks in, why (GM), and what it offers. 48 across 8
motifs, motif-scoped and dealt without replacement.
It produces chains nothing planned: in seed live-table-01 a grave-robber in
area 2 is trying to get a password's intonation right, and area 4 is a door
that needs one. Three routes to it now exist where there was a Wits roll.
Also closes the last two open complaints: the five roll-less decisions now have
real attempts (a voice you could not speak to was the weakest), and {priorCue}
resolves against a cue the party has actually seen instead of granting the
answer by fiat.
Tests 19 -> 24.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Playtest 3 put four players (Codex) through a generated delve with only the
player-facing text. Verdict: "a list of room-prompts, not a place", which
"expects the GM to invent too much of the actual game". It localised that to
one thing — decisions had a cue and a cost but no resolution.
Every decision now carries: an attempt roll, an explicit success outcome, an
explicit failure outcome, and an always-available alternative. 48 blocks across
8 motifs. The alternative is not optional: playtest 1 died on a gate the table
could fail without knowing, and the sharpest complaint this time was a door
whose only options were "guess blind and bleed Banes" or "pay time".
Features are now motif-scoped too, so all three furniture pools belong to the
fiction rather than a global list. 136 authored entries per theme.
Three new invariants make the failure modes unauthorable: every decision has a
resolution, no decision gates progress without an alternative, and every rolled
decision states both success and failure. Tests 16 -> 19.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The review's sharpest finding was that the fiction cohered but the things in
the rooms did not belong to it: only the motif cue fragment was projected, while
decisions and temptations came from global pools. The output was a consistent
wrapper around generic room furniture.
Both now live under motifs.<id> — 6 decisions and 5 temptations each, 88
authored entries across 8 motifs. A `keeping` delve offers a flower that has not
wilted and a room you may search or leave exactly as you found it; a
`precedence` delve offers a corridor that will not let two walk abreast.
Two bugs surfaced while wiring it, both the same shape as one fixed earlier for
cue fragments: decisions and temptations were picked independently per area
rather than dealt, so a pool of 3 repeated a temptation in 75 of 80 test delves.
Both are now dealt without replacement.
Where a long delve outruns its motif pool, decisions top up from the generic
pool but temptations do not. A generic relic breaks the fiction; a repeated one
only looks thin.
Tests 11 -> 15: motif provenance for both pools, and no repeats at 6 and 9 areas.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Build steps 1, 2 and 4 of the plan in DESIGN.md.
core/ is pure JS with zero Foundry globals and 11 passing invariants. The
fiction model has one root draw — an APPETITE plus the ACCOMMODATION someone
made for it — and projects the motif, danger, prize, faction, cue fragments and
the appeasement move from it, so the fiction coheres instead of being four
unrelated draws. 336 kernels from 21 authored lines; 60 generated delves gave
51 distinct kernels.
Cue fragments are tagged by facet (institution/ritual/demand/wound/anchor) and
dealt without replacement. The facet progression across the arc reproduces the
hand-authored paper delve's structure, which had arrived at it by instinct.
Generation and table dice stay apart: pressure.mjs decides when a clock roll is
due and what it means, and never rolls. That is what makes the skeleton seed an
honest promise rather than a half-truth.
paper/ holds the hand-written delve and both playtest logs. spike/ holds the
instrumented harness that measured the Forge outside Foundry.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
tevansandClaude Opus 5